On March 25, 1911, one of the five hundred employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New Yorknoticed that a rag bin near her eighth- floor work station was on fire. Workers immediately tried to extinguish the flames. Their efforts prove futile, as piles of fabric ignited all over the eighth floor. Themanager of the factory ordered his employees to unroll the fire extinguisher hose, but they found itrotted and useless.The shirt factory occupied the top three floors of the ten- story Asch Building. The seventy employeeswho worked on the tenth floor escaped the fire by way of the staircases or climbed onto the roof, where students from New York University, located across the street, stretched ladders over to the Asch Building.The 260 workers on the ninth floor had the worst luck of all. Although the eighth- floor workers tried to warn them by telephone, the call did not reach them, and by the time they learned about the fire, their routes of escape were mostly blocked. Some managed to climb down the cables of the freight elevator. Others crammed into the narrow stairway. Still others climbed onto the single, inadequately constructed fire escape. But that spindly structure could not support the weight of hundreds of people, and it separated from the wall, falling to the ground and carrying many people with it.To combat the disaster, the New York Fire Department sent thirty five pieces of equipment, including a hook and ladder. The young women trapped on the ninth- floor window ledge watched in horror as the ladder, fully raised, stopped far below them, reaching only as far as the sixth floor.Within minutes, the factory- a fire trap typical of the period’s working conditions- was consumed byflame, killing 146 workers, mostly immigrant women. City officials set up a temporary morgue on 26th Street, and over the next few days streams of survivors filed through the building to identify the dead.The Triangle Shirtwaist fire brought a public outcry for laws to regulate the safety of workingconditions. The New York Factory Investigating Commission was formed to examine the workingconditions in factories throughout the state. Their report introduced many new regulations. The fire had occurred during an era of progressive reform that was beginning to sweep the nation, as people decided that government had a responsibility to ensure that private industry protected the welfare of working people.
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